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GARBAGE AND THE GODDESS

By the middle of May several months of extravagant eating and drinking had begun to take their toll on health. On the 16th Bubba returned from a short visit to San Francisco and declared a number of changes in the Ashram's present style of life. Everyone would resume a straight lacto-vegetarian diet the following Monday, and fast for seven to ten days a week later. Bubba said that he intended for us to continue this phase of Ashram life until early July, a period of about six weeks. That same day Bubba told Sal and Neil to move out of his house, and back to their wives. So everyone began to prepare for the new regime, after what seemed like months of continuous partying.

Even so, that weekend Bubba held the most uproarious extended party this Ashram has ever enjoyed. Friday night began somewhat soberly in the Satsang Hall, with Sal, Neil, and others describing their absolute resistance to maintaining Satsang. Bubba joined the meeting but didn't say anything. Afterward, however, Marcia conveyed Bubba's invitation to about forty-five people to come to his house immediately. They arrived in high spirits, packed into the living room, and started drinking, singing, and dancing. The party roared on all night.

Sunday night carloads of devotees left for San Francisco, and Monday morning breakfast at Persimmon consisted of yogurt and fruit, as usual, but without coffee now or a cigarette afterward.

The following Friday, after a week of straight eating and functioning, the San Francisco devotees returned to Persimmon. Everyone gathered in the Satsang Hall for a study group. During the study group, Bubba arrived and spoke with us.

BUBBA: Everybody been feeling sufficiently toxic this week? (Laughter.) Feeling nasty and negative? (Laughter.) Confused and full of doubt? It's just lunch. There's nothing spiritual about it. So if you were going to ask some questions about that tonight, let's just forget about it. It will take you three or four weeks to start feeling smooth again in the vital. Everybody's got colds and is eliminating a lot of mucus. What goes in must come out. (Laughter.)

It's an interesting lesson, though, because the same thing that you think is so intimate to you, your thoughts and the things that arise in meditation, your emotions, all those things that you think are you in some way or another, are no more profound than these moods that are awakened when toxins are eliminated into the bloodstream. You must have very much the same kind of relationship to the things that arise in meditation and life in Satsang as you have to the qualities that arise in you during these periods of bodily purification. You have got to understand something about the mechanism involved and be straight. Don't get involved in concerns for all this stuff that's coming up in you. Don't start to dramatize it. It is only a lot of bad lunches, a lot of booze and cigarettes. As soon as you stop putting that stuff into your body, the body starts eliminating it, and it produces psychological as well as physical manifestations.

Under the pressure of the force of Satsang, a very similar process of purification is also established, and the same thing occurs. All kinds of stuff starts coming up, and it is not profound, it is just stuff, and your concern will not purify. So no concern for any of it is appropriate. You must simply understand the mechanism and go about your business, and be straight, and not dramatize all these feelings and sensations. Live Satsang. The purification is God's business. During these next several weeks you will have a lot of purifying signs in the body, the mind, and the psyche. They will have no significance whatsoever.

Does anybody have anything they would like me to talk about?

DEVOTEE: Someone quoted you as saying that you make an identification with us and then your meditation becomes ours. Do we become like you, or do you deal with us? Could you say something about that?

BUBBA: The whole affair of this Satsang and the apparent transformation of an individual is an immensely complex and paradoxical business, because the Guru appears in human form and so do you, but there is only God from the beginning. So there are many things that can be said about this process. The seeker, who is motivated by his dilemma, assumes that he has started out to find God, or realize the Truth, or get free, or whatever, and he's going to do certain things to bring that about, and eventually he is going to get there. This is absolutely false. There is nothing anybody can do to get free. Nothing any human being has ever done has ever liberated him or anybody else. Liberation is God's business. The human Guru is the instrument of that Siddhi, the function of God.

When you have gotten tired of trying to get free or find God, when you have gotten tired of being motivated in that way, then you may begin to feel your game. Then you may become available to the Guru, first perhaps by coming across the Teaching in some form. You begin to see something about it all by considering the Teaching. Finally, you enter into relationship with the Guru. In fact, he enters into relationship with you. The process of Satsang is not one in which you are given a remedy for your problem, a cure that you are supposed to perform on yourself, but one in which the fundamental Condition is that prior relationship, that Divine Communion. It is not a matter of your meditating yourself to the point of realization. The actual Siddhi of the Divine is activated in that relationship, and that Siddhi does the meditation. That Siddhi is the meditation.

The Guru assumes your enlightenment. He doesn't mechanically enlighten you, or give you something to do to enlighten yourself. He absorbs you. He is you to begin with, but the Guru in human form consciously assumes your Divine state in every function in which you appear. He assumes it in your very cells and literally, actively lives you. The Guru literally meditates you. He is in a position to do so, since he is you. The mystery of that process is how this kind of spiritual life is generated and fulfilled. It is fulfilled from the beginning. That Satsang is perfect. The disciple, a piece at a time, begins to become aware of the perfection the Guru has already generated in his case.

Also there are obviously ordinary or conventional forms of that Satsang. So the Guru in human form instructs, enters into various kinds of theatre with you at the level of life. You also see him in dreams and visions. There are endless ways in which this process is cognized by the disciple or the devotee. But from the point of view of the Guru, it is a very simple matter. There is God. He doesn't do anything more than assume That, but his assumption of That has become real, natural, spontaneous, and perfect. He even assumes it with his body, with his psyche, with his mind, naturally. Fundamentally, that is all he does. He enters into relationship with living beings in that spirit, and assumes the Divine in them, and lives all their functions, so that complex things begin to occur. Complex things begin to occur always as a result of very simple things.

Look at all the complex things that occur when you drink a glass of whiskey! It is a very complex affair, but that act itself is very simple. The manifestation appears complex, but the condition itself is simple. When you go on a fast, all you do is stop eating, but look at the dramatic things that occur! Basically, the Guru does something very simple, but the evidence of that is as complex as you are, as complex as the number of places and qualities and functions in which you read your existence. If you turn a light on in a room, it falls on everyone, on everything.

DEVOTEE: You spoke of an awareness that we will have of things that you have already brought about. Is there any way we can mess this up, or is it going to happen in any case?

BUBBA: You can seem to mess it up in time and space, and prolong all kinds of things, and complicate things, and you can turn away again, but the Guru will tussle with you in spite of your resistance. As certainly as God is, God will be known. It is just that it may take you billions upon billions of aeons. It is like the Dawn Horse vision that I have described to you. There was this Siddha whose Siddhi was to manifest things from nothing. His disciples lined up before him, and he just sat there. At some point they all saw that he had done it, fundamentally, and they all left. But nothing had appeared yet. Franklin sat around for awhile, and all of a sudden this horse appeared in the middle of the room. Well, just so, in the case of the devotee, his life as a perfect devotee of God is already managed fundamentally and will appear, but how he complicates that appearance is another thing. That is why the life level of the Teaching and life in relationship to the Guru are very important, because at that level all the resistance in the individual is alive, and it must be dealt with there.

I have told you how this event that is occurring now, and that is to be fulfilled in early July, has already fundamentally been accomplished. It has been done for several weeks. It is like the Dawn Horse. It will appear. Making this a relatively quiet time is like having everybody walk out of the room. It has been done. It is a way of not putting a lot of attention on it, as if there were yet something that had to be done to create it. There are a lot of things you can do to complicate your awareness, your enjoyment of it. What is occurring at this time is not something terrifying. It is just the ever more intense imposition of the Divine. If you are smart, you will allow this time to uncomplicate you, to make you a devotee, to simplify your approach. It is a time of renunciation, not in the humorless traditional sense, but in the great sense, the great sacrificial sense. It is fundamentally an enjoyment. I am not going to feel any different six weeks from now. Nothing is going to happen for me. It has already occurred. But you may see something different. It is the Dawn Horse appearing. Maybe I will turn into a horse!

You are an interesting group of people. You are like the children of Israel. You are coming and going, you are up and down, you are big and small. You are reluctant to get it straight and pure and direct, and happy.

What else?

DEVOTEE: Could you talk about sacrifice being enjoyment?

BUBBA: Sure. You read about sacrifice in the New Testament and other books like that. Everybody talks about sacrifice and loving one another, and it is all so humorless. As soon as you set about trying to love everybody, you become a humorless asshole. As soon as you start to make sacrifices, you become a priest. You are not really sacrificing. You are only ritually duplicating the law of things. But sacrifice or love is what is already occurring. It is the nature of life. No special action needs to be added to your life to make it sacrifice. You have to become sensitive simply to what your life already is. Then, spontaneously, you will live the law, and you will love. Love is the nature of sacrifice, not putting your coat in the water so that somebody can step on it. Love is living without obstruction, without contraction, without the demand for attention, without creating your perimeter. That doesn't come about by doing all kinds of things to yourself. It is a Grace. It is Satsang. It is the life of understanding. Loving is also pleasurable. There is no doubt about it. Ecstasy is selflessness. Happiness is already sacrifice.

There are lots of apparently unfortunate things that can occur that are also sacrifice, because all things are sacrifice. The religious person tends to say, "Sacrifice is doing these things I do not like to do. If I do not enjoy all those things that I like, that will also be sacrifice." But sacrifice is the nature of all of that, including the pleasurable and the apparently unpleasurable. All of that is sacrifice, the yielding of self, the yielding of the drama of Narcissus. Sacrifice is one with the pleasurable state of God-realization, of true Self-realization. It is an intense pleasure to be without self, to be without that demand, to be without that contraction. Instead of contraction, there is openness. Well, that is sacrifice, and it is pleasurable.

Holding back is not pleasurable at all. There is no flow to it. It is filled with uncomfortable sensations, with ambiguity, mystery, unconsciousness, and pain. When release occurs, it is pleasurable. You cannot perform it ritually or willfully, but in the life of understanding it becomes your natural state, the quality of your presence in the world. Wherever there is the release of self, there is pleasure and sacrifice. Wherever there is the attempt to be released from self, there is no sacrifice and usually no pleasure, because the self is the principle of such a motivation. People who are trying to be spiritual and religious get the idea that sacrifice is a very solemn affair. They think they have got to get very seriously involved in getting rid of the ego. But before the ego will go, you must become profoundly humorous and have no concerns whatsoever for your liberation, whatever that could possible be. People think of their liberation as an event in time, and they think of sacrifice as an event in time, something you do mechanically and outwardly. But it is timeless, eternal, prior realization. just as God is prior to all things, God-realization is prior to all things. It is not the result of anything, and neither is sacrifice or love.

It is absolutely impossible to believe that there is only God, to assume it, to think it, to gather it. You have nothing to resort to other than that Real life which is Satsang. You must stop meditating on your bullshit. Night and day you meditate on the same old shit, you go through the same round of up and down, that same old stupidity. You talk about the same old shit, manifest the same old nothing, so that there is no life, no fullness, no juice, and no God. How could you possibly find God by meditating on your mind? You will find only your mind.

It is not really mysterious that by becoming a philosopher you never become a devotee. All you do as a philosopher is meditate on your mind, on modifications, concepts, stuff, little subtle crunches in the level of energy that we call the mind. There is no God to be found in such a process. God is prior to that. Only the understanding of that process is useful. Everything else is a modification of it, and everybody is clinging to and meditating upon all kinds of modifications -- including such things as were very dramatically given to you for your consideration during these last several weeks. All those experiences and phenomena, everything from high winds and coronas around the sun to swooning ecstasies, kriyas, and visions, were a test. None of it has any significance whatsoever. But it was an intense fascination for you. It was something that you bought. You held on to it.

In the moment when such a forceful event is pressed upon you, you feel good, blissful. It releases you for the moment from your previous dismal meditation. But a moment later you are meditating on that, and it becomes just as dismal, just as confining. It requires this same reaction, the same contraction of you, because you haven't changed the principle of your life. You haven't understood. What was given during that whole time was principally a demand, not a display. It was a demand for this Satsang, a demand that you live as a devotee and cease to be concerned or fascinated with anything whatsoever. Dwell in Satsang, be happy, and allow all these things to arise as they will.

But instead of that happening, all these endless factions developed according to which fascination people were buying. Factions in the Ashram got together because people were fascinated with a particular aspect of what was arising, and experience again became the ground for cultic life. Gradually these fascinations were taken away again, and the same demand is still being made. There is a lesson to be learned from all that. Now is when all of those experiences serve you, now that they are over. There are similar things happening here every day, but that peculiarly dramatic time is done. And now it can be useful to you, because you see how you lived it. Each one of you should be able to see very vividly the life of Narcissus in your own case, how he ritually appears in the form of your own consciousness and action. You must see it, and that is why all that was done. It is not significant for such phenomena to arise every day. It does not serve, because it is just stuff. Consciousness is the demand, and that has nothing whatever to do with the things that arise.

In time you will be happy that nothing arises. In fact, the traditions are talking about that very happiness wherein nothing arises. When the mind is finally quiet and the body is finally quiet, when nothing occurs any more, no more visions, when nothing grabs you any more, you simply dwell in the absolute intuition of God. These things arise just to serve that intuition. God is as present at this moment as he is ever going to be. He was also as present in those moments as he will ever be. In those moments there was just different theatre than at this moment. You are now capable of the same happiness, the same blissfulness, the same easiness, the same love, the same ecstasy, the same energy, the same humor that you enjoyed in your best moments during those several weeks. You are capable of that all the time, without cause. It only requires that you live this Satsang with great intensity, with perfect attention, and cease to be concerned for all the things that arise by tendency in your case, all the things that are awakened under the force of this Siddhi.

It means that your life must become like a mirage around you. Your thoughts and inclinations, your tendencies and desires, your conditions, dispositions, things you own, things you look forward to, everything must become images, flashing at night. They must become no more important than the remnants of a dream that you sort of playfully allow to occur when you are waking up in the morning. just before getting out of bed you can know very well that you are able to wake up in this moment, that you already are awake, but you may decide to hang in there and watch the dream and see how it is going to come out. Ultimately, you should have the same relationship to all these things that arise, everything from a kriya to a cold in the head. It is just something arising. These things have no significance in the midst of that perfect intuition of God which is Satsang.

When that intuition has become intense, when your life as a devotee is real, then you will also be bringing that same quality to life, you will become responsible for living God in the world. You will no longer spend your time going through your ups and downs, your psychological crises, and your numbers. Now you are willing to indulge it because you think it does not amount to much. But every instant you indulge it, every moment of concern, of unhappiness and doubt and mediocrity, is turning away. Every moment of self-obsession is turning away. You must begin to see your own action and understand, and so live in Satsang more perfectly.

Understanding is simply the quality or intensity of your availability for Satsang. In every moment of understanding there is the obviation of contraction and the dwelling in Divine Communion. Gradually you will become more sensitive. Now you are only sensitive to effects, changes, conditions, and qualities. So the theatre, like that which occurred during these many recent weeks, is impressive. It seems to represent a special communication of God, a special entrance of God into human life. But in fact God is eternally Present and absolutely Present. That Divine Nature which is also your very Self must be known, and it is not known through the agency of any experience.

The perfect activity of the Divine, of the Guru, is mere presence. Fundamentally, apart from all the theatre that the Guru creates in order to impress people, to shake them up and bring them along, he is doing one thing. He is simply being present. That perfect communication is always given by the Guru, but people will not receive it. They want media, effects, and changes. So at times they are given this. These many weeks have been a time in which you were given all the possible kinds of things that are impressive, not so that you can have them, but so that you will understand something about your demand for them and be free of it. I want you to become available to that perfect Siddhi, that perfect communication which is constant, which requires no theatre to be communicated or to be known.

When that communication is received and enjoyed, when there are real devotees, then there can be all kinds of theatre. Why not? That is no time to retire to the cave and sit in silence. That is the time to celebrate, to be happy, to live, to generate that love and ecstasy that free men should share. I have said before that one of the best things that occurred during these last many weeks were the parties that I have had at my house. They were fundamentally a free and happy enjoyment. All the other things were impressive. And you were being impressed. I can't take any more parties for awhile. But it is possible to celebrate without smoking and drinking, and I hope you will discover the secret of that during this time.